


Daughter Of The Morrigan

by tielan



Series: Maria and the Morrigan [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Touching, Daemons, Drama, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-23 06:19:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16153358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: He’s put his hands on Isthus before under mitigating circumstances. She’s touched Saavi before, also in a crisis. Given her injury, these are certainly mitigating circumstances.





	Daughter Of The Morrigan

**Author's Note:**

> Six years, phew!

Steve wakes cold, muscles spasming hard from the chill of the floor.

He jerks up, heart pounding. He’s in a cage – silvery mesh with a solid-sheet base, large enough to hold him but not large enough for him to stand in.

Saavi’s not there.

He can feel her and it calms the worst of the brief clutch at his heart. She’s...sort of...nearby, but it’s not the usual connection—

“Steve?”

Relief rushes through him at the sound of her voice. “Saavi!” Her relief trickles across to him, along the bond between them, strangely muted. “Where are you?”

A moment later, he hears the pad of her feet and then the rattling echo of metal as she rears up on her hind legs, putting her paws up on the wire mesh screen that separates the two compartments from each other. “You feel...different. Something’s wrong.”

Steve swallows, having already taken a look around. Two cage compartments, separate doors, a metal mesh that dulls the bond between human and dæmon...

His mouth is suddenly dry. “It’s the titanium manganese.”

“The—” Saavi breaks off as she looks around, and her tail begins to lash as she bares her teeth. “Can you get out?”

Steve doesn’t answer, already running his hands along the cage door – old and a little rusty. Locked with a padlock – new and shiny and unlikely to give way. He lies down on his back, his feet set against the back of the cage and his fingers on the door and shoves with all his strength. His teeth grit as he pushes, his muscles strain, but he can’t feel the metal giving way. _It doesn’t need to be much – just a little..._

It doesn’t break. Old and rusty – but not old enough, not rusty enough. And from here, down on the floor, he can see up to the gap between the cages – the deep gleam of the blade lurking in the shadows above them, waiting for the command to fall.

The sense of Saavi paces in the space where she’s always been – always! And when the blade falls between them, she won’t be there anymore.

“No,” Saavi snarls, echoing both their thoughts. “It won’t happen.”

“The hinges aren’t giving way,” Steve pants. “Can you see any other...?”

He stops as the door opens and man walks in, his dæmon trotting at his heels. He looks at Steve and a faint frown wrinkles his brow as he makes his way across the room. “You’re not supposed to be awake yet.”

Steve doesn’t have words he looks at the brown-haired and pink man and the brown and white haired dog-dæmon that follows him. _Like a pet,_ he thinks, unable to contain his nausea and anger – or the bruising fear that beats against his breastbone with fists more vicious than any bully.

No question what the cage has been used for.

No question what the cage is about to do.

“Hey,” he says, trying to engage. The man looks up, an expression of polite interest on his face, as though Steve’s not a prisoner and he’s not about to cut the dæmon link between Steve and Saavi. “What’s your name?”

The man blinks, as though no-one’s ever asked him this question before. “Stephen.”

“Hey, really? My name’s Steve, too.” Steve projects bright friendliness. “What do you plan to do to us?”

He wonders if it will even reach the man. Vague memories of the wartime research into the severed tease the edges of his memory – he’d been focused on stopping Schmidt and Zola, not lingering over the horrors they’d perpetrated. Howard said the severed had no creativity and no compassion, though intellectually they were much what they’d been before.

 _Dull as dust,_ he’d muttered. _The lowercase D kind._

This man is staring at Steve, a faint frown on his face. “This isn’t right,” he says, almost plaintively. “The drugs should have kept you under—”

 _Our metabolism._ Steve shivers with relief – then feels Saavi tense. Out in the corridor, distant voices murmur. People are coming this way – coming to watch him be severed?

They’re running out of time.

“My body processes things a little differently to most.” Steve keeps talking to the man, hoping to distract him. “You don’t have to do this,” he says, and he keeps his voice reasonable. Saavi’s growling – a low-level feline rumble in the throat but maybe the man can’t hear it. “If you let us out, we can—”

Can what?

What can he offer this broken half-man and his severed dæmon? With all the technology available in this new world in which he’s woken up, there’s still nothing that can join together what intercision has cut.

Forever and eternally apart.

_No._

The voices grow nearer and Steve rattles the cage door, as much to release his feelings as in the hope to break free. “Please, let us out!” Over in her cage, Saavi throws herself against the door and the whole cage rattles.

The man is looking slightly bewildered now, confused by the noise. He’s probably not used to encountering the pleas of his victims, especially not if they’re drugged. His dog-dæmon looks at him and tilts her head, as though puzzled – his distress doesn’t communicate to her anymore – and Steve exhales on another wave of nausea and feels Saavi’s quivering rage.

“You can get us out of here,” Steve says. “You’re not like them. You don’t want to do this—” The voices are close now, nearly by the door – close enough that he can hear their tones, eager and annoyed. Then—something big goes boom, and he feels the subtle quiver of the ground – hears the rattle of the blade high above them.

_Rattling sabres, ready for war._

They’re here.

The man looks down at the board and begins flipping switches.

“Stephen,” Steve begins, but Stephen’s not listening, biting his lip in agitation. He doesn’t respond to Steve’s pleas, to Saavi’s yowls.

He looks up at the gunshots, though, right outside the room, a sharp staccato. Loud cries and someone’s yelp of pain – a man’s, but not a voice Steve recognises. A moment later, there’s two heavy bangs against the door – like bullets destroying a lock, and the door is kicked in.

Steve glimpses a blur of black feathers and feet and beak up high as a bird-dæmon swoops in before dropping onto the dog dæmon which yelps and tries to bite him. A moment later, Maria’s through the door, her weapon out and sweeping the room.

But Stephen’s grabbed a gun – simple fear on his face, blind survival.

“No, don’t!” Steve calls, even as the shots ring out.

He watches in slow motion as Maria is slammed back against the doorjamb. But her aim is more accurate: the dog dæmon vanishes under Isthus’ talons, and he flutters over to her shoulder and murmurs in her ear.

Steve’s hands are bloodless fists against the door. “Hill?”

“Rogers,” she manages, dragging herself up with her right hand as her left grips her side. “Like some help getting out?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.” The words are out before he hears them, and then curses his stupidity. Yeah, it’s too much trouble when she’s bleeding out between her fingers!

Maria doesn’t seem to notice the incongruity of his comment. Her mouth is pinched with pain as she stumbles to the desk, and starts looking for a key, then shakes her head. “Stand back.”

He pushes himself into a corner, out of the line of fire – especially since her hands are shaking now. But she shoots the padlock of Steve’s cage with cold accuracy. He kicks the door open as she wraps both hands around the gun to shoot the lock off Saavi’s cage, then wraps an arm around her shoulders to hold her up as he yanks Saavi’s door open.

The gun clatters out of her hands to the floor.

–

_In the midst of an alien mothership, she touches him without any awareness of him as a man. The pressure of her fingertips is painful against his healing bruises but Steve bites his lip and doesn’t speak._

_If he opens his mouth to say one thing, he’ll say a lot of things he shouldn’t. So he just holds on tight to Saavi and lets Agent Hill do what she has to do._

_But his hand on Saavi’s pelt reminds him of her hands on Saavi’s pelt – cool fingers, tentative at first, then a firmer grip as she accepted the necessity. Separated from his dæmon by yards of alien mothership and nothing at all, Steve had shivered – not in the atavistic disgust of someone touching his dæmon, but in something that felt shockingly like desire._

_Now, he watches her set his leg, focusing on the slight pressures of her fingers as she checks circulation at his ankle, focusing on the faint darkening of her skin as she touches his thigh._

_Steve knows what to do with pain, how to endure._

_He doesn’t know what to do with the tightening of his ribcage when she looks up at the medical crews picking their way across the decking, and relief courses across her face._

–

The fainting fit – dizzy spell, what have you – is only a moment. Then Maria’s boots kick against the floor as she tries to regain her balance, groping wildly for something to hold onto.

“Easy,” Steve tells her, slipping his arm around her back. She should relax at the stabilisation, but this is Maria. Her whole body tenses, and she clutches for anything – anything that isn’t Steve. A moment later, Saavi is there, pushing her head up beneath Maria’s bloody hand.

Steve makes a noise somewhere between a wheeze and a grunt. Every nerve in his body is pulsing, his heart a thunder of bombs exploding against his ribs.

This makes twice.

He’s put his hands on Isthus before under mitigating circumstances. She’s touched Saavi before, also in a crisis.

Given her injury, these are certainly mitigating circumstances.

But the first time Steve didn’t know what it felt like to have her hand clenched in his soul. He hadn’t dreamed about the softness of Isthus’ feathers and the bird-dæmon ’s heart beating wildly against his fingertips. He hadn’t fantasised about her hands stroking Saavi from nape to tail while he watches, mesmerised and enraptured.

Someone touching your dæmon is supposed to be a violation of your soul.

Steve _wants_ her hands on Saavi; what does that make him?

At least he never felt the yearning to touch Peggy’s dæmon like this, because as bad as it is with Maria, at least she’s already different. He asked around – in a roundabout way – and learned about her witch heritage – her grandmother and her great-grandmother and the oddities of witch bloodlines that are a known genetic peculiarity, just rare.

Or maybe he wants her hands on Saavi _because_ of her witch heritage?

Either way, whatever he wants, Maria clearly doesn’t want the same thing. She yanks her hand back, like Saavi’s pelt burned her flesh, but the only thing she has to hold onto now is Steve. Her grab for stability lands her hand on his chest, hooks her fingers into the weave of his suit like she’s clinging to him. His arm tightens around her waist, holding her firm against his hip.

Maria turns her face up to his, her eyes endlessly blue, her lips parting on an indrawn breath. And Steve nearly leans in to kiss her, there and then. The sudden realisation that his fingers are sticky – that his hand is pressing against the bullet wound—

Her parted lips aren’t a sign of desire. It’s a sign of _pain_. Pain which Steve is inflicting.

He swings her up into his arms.

“Too heavy,” she protests weakly.

“Shut up,” Steve tells her. He doesn’t mean to sound short, but shame coats his throat and chokes his breath. He’s accustomed to the rush of lust after a battle; he’s not accustomed to feeling it for someone who’s injured and not reciprocating. “You can’t walk, and I’m more than up to carrying you— Saavi, get the door.”

Thankfully, it’s a lever handle, which Saavi can operate by rearing up on her hind legs and using her paws. And when the door swings open, Isthus launches himself through the crack and out into the corridor.

“Clear,” Maria murmurs and tenses in his arms again. “Rogers, you don’t need to—”

“You’ve been shot.” Does the woman have an allergy to being assisted? “You’ll excuse me if I don’t believe you.”

“If we meet someone—”

“Then Saavi or Isthus will give us advance warning and I’ll put you down.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“No,” he answers promptly. “But you do and Isthus does, and Saavi’s following him, and I’m following Saavi. Stop arguing with me, Maria!”

Her mouth sets into a tight, mutinous line, but she shuts up. And Steve wonders why, out of all the smiling, willing, eager women of the world, the ones he’s most attracted to are the ones who steadfastly hold him at bay.

It’s not something to be thought about right now, not when he can hear fighting elsewhere in the complex – gunfire and explosions, acrid scents wafting in on air currents, and the vibration of the floor beneath his boots. Not when they’re trying to get out of here before something blows them to kingdom come. Not when Maria’s injured and bleeding, her breath short, her pupils dilated.

“How many of ours are out there?”

“Natasha. Stark,” she says, a little breathlessly. “And a STRIKE team that leaped at the chance to help out.”

“Sandwin?”

“Rumlow.”

She says it like a curse. And Steve’s about to ask why half the operatives he’s spoken to have that same reaction to Rumlow and his team – sure, they’re a bit rough, but they’re skilled operatives – when something booms and the facility trembles. Maria’s head lifts and her eyes scan the ceiling.

“Door—”

He’s already sprinting for the nearest doorway – metal-framed, somewhere to brace. A moment later, Isthus swoops back around the corner, Saavi mere yards behind, even as the corridor lights flicker, and the plaster on the ceiling begins to sift down as the paint on the walls begins to flake—

Steve sets Maria down on her feet, bracing them both against the doorframe, even as Isthus flutters into Maria’s arms and Saavi stretches up on her hind legs and presses into his side as he wraps one arm around her and the other around Maria and Isthus—

Crashing noises, shattering glass and plastic, the hard squeal of metal stress over the groan of stone. Steve buries his face in Maria’s hair and breathes shallowly. She’s doing the same, with her forehead braced against his shoulder, one arm curved his chest, the other curled around Isthus as the world becomes a cacophony of dust and rubble, crashing down around them.

The ground shakes, and Steve presses closer as everything trembles, squashing Saavi between them as he tries to protect them all while waiting for the building to fall down on them.

Vaguely he becomes aware of a ringing in his ears, a din that overlays the harsh sounds of his breathing and Maria’s, the trickling crumble of cement and brick, the creak of metal structuring holding up the building.

He shifts, lifting his head and realising that they’re alive and mostly whole. Nothing’s quite come down on them, although the corridor beyond them shows signs of damage, and something’s brought down parts of the roof further along. But there’s the slightest of breezes pushing at him, and Isthus rouses with a squawk, shaking out his feathers as he scrabbles up Maria’s uniform breast to her shoulder. Saavi eases herself back down, shaking her coat out, even as she sniffs the air.

“Velys is coming—”

Isthus pushes his head against Maria’s cheek with an odd almost chirruping noise, and Steve realises that she’s not conscious – that he wedged her up against the doorframe with little regard for her injury. He cups her cheek with his hand, trembling at the chill of her skin, terrified when her head lolls.

“Maria—”

She jerks awake, and the faint light sifting through the dust shows her blinking dazedly.

“Rogers?”

“Hey.” He brushes off her cheek with his thumb, the relief in him like an adrenaline rush. “Still with me? Stark’s on his way with Velys...”

With a ruffle of feathers that just brushes Steve’s cheek, Isthus launches himself into the air, flapping madly as he tries to gain height in the narrow space. Somehow – maybe the dust in the air, maybe just a misjudgement of his strength – he can’t seem to make it up. So Saavi puts her paws on the wall, and ducks her head under his claws to give him a hoist into the air. Isthus flutters a little, but manages to get air beneath his wings to make his way out through the narrow flows of air, presumably to tell the rescuers where they are and how to find them, although he says nothing – not even a ‘thank you’ for the help.

And Steve looks back at Maria, her breathing carefully even, her eyes closed, the lashes a thick sweep along her too-pale cheek, and knows gratefulness would be too much to expect in the face of her present vulnerability.

This time she barely protests as he picks her up. Steve eases her head against his shoulder, balances her in his arms, and then starts picking his way out.

“Rescue crews on their way.”

“I know.” He heard the update in her earpiece. “We’ll meet them on the way out.”

And he follows Saavi’s careful slink through the rubble, balancing them both through the uneven ground and the narrow spaces while Maria breathes steadily through the pain.

Isthus’ cry rings out, high and distant, and Saavi’s roar lifts in response. They’re close. A pile of rubble has fallen in, glass and metal and concrete tumbled down to make an opening to the outside, but the shards are sharp and the opening is narrow – big enough as the crow flies, but not large enough for a lioness.

Not that that’s going to stop Saavi.

Steve doesn’t try to stop her – she’s his own soul, after all – but he does say, “Be careful of the glass—”

“I _know_.” The swing of her tail is almost defiant as she swipes her paws sideways before putting them down. But even that movement only clears the worst of it, and the shards prick deep.

Gritting his teeth against the shared pain between him and his dæmon , Steve rebalances Maria in his arms as he looks from the too-small opening back to the dark and crumbled corridors from whence they came. She doesn’t move, her eyes closed and the corners of her mouth drawn in and down.

“Maria?”

“Still here.” Her eyelids close more tightly for a moment. “Tony’s coming.”

Isthus’ caw rings out, high and distant, and then Steve hears the sound of Tony’s flight thrusters seeping in beneath the blustering wind. At the break in the wall, Saavi roars to signal their position and a moment later, Velys’ howl rises through the air.

There’s a clunk of metal and Stark calls, “Hill? Rogers?”

“Down here,” Steve calls.

Cement grinds, and metal creaks and strains and groans. A sudden gust of wind blows dust at them, and Steve turns so his back is to the wind and his shoulder is sheltering Maria, even as her hand comes up to shield her eyes. Saavi slips back down to them, and the pressure of her weight against his leg steadies him, both physically and emotionally. His dæmon, his strength, his soul - and they’re still one, unsevered.

But for Maria it could have gone so differently.

The gap is growing wider, and as more light and more wind pours in, Isthus swoops back down to land on Maria’s chest , his beak pressing hard against her cheek. Her hand comes up to caress his head and Isthus leans into the touch, taking and giving comfort.

The widening gap is letting in more light – it might be big enough for them to get out now, and Steve turns to squint up through the dust into the grey daylight.

“I think it’s clear,” Saavi murmurs, and pushes past Steve to climb the rubble. He follows her, his footsteps careful as he makes his way to the opening. It’s a little high for him to jump when he’s holding Maria, though, and she’s not in any condition to pull herself up...

A lupine head pokes through just as he’s reaching where Saavi is standing beneath the opening, Velys’ eyes are sharp and bright as she takes stock of everything. A moment later, Stark calls a warning, then floats down and in through the hole, the suit keeping him buoyant.

“Wasn’t _Cap_ the one who needed rescuing?”

In his arms, Maria tenses. “She got shot while freeing me,” Steve says shortly. “Can you take her up?”

“I don’t know,” Stark says offhandedly. “Is she going to shoot me if I put my arms around her? Or maybe Isthus will peck out my eyes?”

Isthus clacks his beak together as though contemplating the thought, but Maria exhales. “Stark, just shut up and get me out of here, please.”

“Ooh, she said ‘please’!” But Stark steps up and the transfer is made with only one hiss of pain from Maria. Then he’s rising out of the ruins of the building.

Steve notes that for all his teasing, Stark is handling Maria carefully, even scraping his suit against the broken cement of the hole as he angles them through the confined opening so she’s in no danger of being bumped.

He lets Saavi spring through the hole before leaping up to grab the rim of the hole and swinging himself up. The edge doesn’t feel too stable and he takes a few steps to more solid-feeling surface, and turns to look back.

The facility that he and Saavi went into was huge and archaic; a ridiculously ancient building out in the wilds of Canada, built by a government that didn’t care about land rights at the time, just whether they could build a device to perform intercision and perform tests with minimal interference. And the secret held up for nearly a hundred years before the advent of smartphones, and a janitor who took a photo of a severed woman and the hawk dæmon that lay limp in her cradled hands, and S.H.I.E.L.D found out about it.

Now, it’s mostly rubble. Although something about the way it imploded might suggest—

“Rogers! Are you coming or just breathing hard?”

Steve quickly makes his way down the steep slope of the collapsed wall, heading for the Quinjet hovering over the rubble, its ramp down to let them in. As he and Saavi lope up the ramp and into the hold, Maria is arguing with Stark to be let down – something about the indignity of being carried around—

“In the medibay,” he tells Stark.

“I’m fine to get there myself—”

“No,” he tells her flatly. “You’re not. Medibay. Now.”

Such is his temper that neither Stark nor Maria argue the point. Stark doesn’t even grumble when Steve shoulders him out to attend to Maria’s injury with bandages and a painkiller. But when he glances back to check on Saavi, he finds Velys and Stark eyeing his dæmon– or, more correctly – the bloody handprint on her fur.

–

Two hours later in a S.H.I.E.L.D facility in Manitoba, showered and shaved, with Saavi’s fur washed and clean, Stark stops him in an empty corridor.

“How’s Hill?”

“Stitched and drugged. She’ll be okay with a few weeks’ rest.”

“Uhuh.” Velys makes a whining noise in her back of her throat, and Saavi growls softly. Stark looks at the two dæmons and then meets Steve’s gaze. “Was there anything you’d like to share with the class? Like how Hill’s handprint came to be on your dæmon’s fur?”

_Desperation and thoughtlessness, and sharp, rending **want** —_

Steve steps around the other man, Saavi watching Velys with wary golden eyes as they go.

“Nope,” he says.

 


End file.
